The (next to?) last Cut and Come Again Zinnia cut of the year!

I just posted about how to get free flowers from this year’s blooms. The Zinnias in my back yard were way past due for a cut. Anything I left on in the after pics were from blooms past their prime. These will make the perfect seed heads for next year’s crop. Since I love Zinnias so much I may even go control freak and harvest them. I’ve got 2-3 new beds in planning stages and I’d love for them to have Zinnia’s every summer with little effort from me. All of the plants have buds forming as well. If the weather holds out I may even get one more cut from this batch. I think this one makes cut 7 or 8 this year. If I’d been more diligent about puttering I could of gotten more!

: Seed head

: Bottom Bed is a little more sparse, but even though these aren’t cut and come again zinnia’s, I’ve still gotten 3-4 cuts from therm

: Final bouquet before it heads in to be prepped for vases

: The cream and the pink are a tie for my faves this year

: The pinks

: Bottom bed is getting bare

Gardening; A lesson on getting more plant for your $$$

Posted: 2011/10/17 | Author: Lola | Filed under: Gardening | Tags: Begonia, Coleus, Cut Flower Gardening, Flower Gardening, Football Mum, Garden, Gardening, Hosta, Midwest Gardening, Plant, Seed, Zinnia | Leave a comment

Yesterday was a pretty nice day here. I had some cleaning up and planting/moving chores to handle in the front bed. Our yard is participating in the neighborhood Halloween contest. The Husband is out of commission with a nasty back injury and the kids were entranced in they new toys they got at their combined Birthday Party Saturday. So I opened up the front door, turned up the itunes and got to work. The Home Office windows look out at the front yard and beds so I often get the front bed chores done with music blaring from the windows.

Last summer I planted some pretty annuals in my hanging baskets. Begonia with a dark leaf and a hot pink flower, A pink and green Coleus and some spiky little white plant/flower I can’t remember the name of. I’ve talked before about how you can sometimes get more for your plant $$ buck by allowing this years annuals to either make seed heads or simply stay in the ground and wait and see if they come back next year.

Pics below

Plants I have that will make seeds I can use to get free plants next year:

Zinnia Snap Dragons Sunflowers Marigolds

Tomatoes ; I should cop to the fact that these are always accidental. As in the maters dropped and rotted and then I got new volunteer plants next year. But this happens every summer.

The best way to do this is to let nature take it’s course, leave enough heads on the plants to get seed and in late fall or very early spring rip off the seed heads and work them into your mulch and soil around where you want them. You can also get all control freak and collect the seed heads and store them in a paper sack in a cool dry place over the winter. Make sure they are very dry and in breathable sack or you could have a moldy mess on your hands next spring.

This year I got crazy and dried a bunch of pepper seeds from these awesome peppers we got from the local organic produce delivery place called Green B.E.A.N. We shall see how that goes next spring.

Mums

Now I did turn some small sunflower heads into the soil in the front bed, but I was there to plant mums, move mums, rip apart the baskets and plant the annuals in hopes of having them survive the winter. It is probably a bit late to be planting mums. I got great ones at Lowe’s for $4 each. When you plant them be sure to break up the bound roots with your hands or hand trowel. Also be sure to plant them deep enough and pack and mulch them well enough so they don’t heave out of the soil when we have our harsh winter. The spindly little mum is one from last fall that didn’t get much sunlight this year. He had to relocate to a sunnier part of the spotted front bed.

Re-potting the annuals from the baskets.

You don’t really need all that much root ball from the annuals in the baskets. I wanted all the Coleus because even if it does not make it over the winter I can and did plant it along the walk to assist with my design for our porch and yard. I also planted the two begonias, but i tossed the white spindly things. I have three of them in the front bed already and am out of room.

As with all transplants be sure to water well.

Still to do

I have one Hosta to rip out and relocate further back to allow more room for the Lilly of the Valley to spread. And one Football mum that needs a much sunnier home. He is kind of puny though so I may just have to mulch him really well and check on him in the spring.

: Coleus in the ground all summer

: End of the season hanging baskets . I wear my old Crocs in the Garden!

: Coleus from the hanging baskets

: Root ball pulled from hanging basket

: Bound roots

: Broken up roots

: Mums in the front bed

: Mum 1

: Mum 2 and relocated mum

: Mum 3

Indian Summer in the garden or why we still have peppers growing

Posted: 2011/10/09 | Author: Lola | Filed under: Gardening | Tags: Balloon Flower, Coleus, Cut Flower Gardening, Flower Gardening, Football Mum, Garden, Gardening, Home, Indian Summer, Midwest Gardening, Mums, raised bed gardening, Square Foot Gardening, Sunflower, trellis gardening, Zinnia | Leave a comment

: Peppers

: One man down of many

: Hot pink

: Seeded head

: Pretty fall Zinnia’s still going strong

: I need to cut these

: I have been letting the Zinnia’s go.

: Light pink Zinnia

: Pink Zinnia

: White mums

: Spooky Coleus

: Football Mum

: Football Mum. I need to move it so it can get really big.

: One lone Balloon Flower decided to make a 2nd bloom appearance

: This one is just getting her groove on.

: Marigold’s

: Dried sunflower carcass

: HUGE Sunflower head and my really ugly hand

: Blackberry Tiger Lillies have gone to seed. Let me know if you want some!

: The neighbor saw a snake in our garden

: MiniMe found a toad in the garden

: One eyed Toad

: C’mon over, we are ready for you

I took a good look at the garden last Thursday and took some pics. I am pleased that we have been blessed with almost 2 weeks of good warm weather which has allowed my late tomatoes and peppers to keep growing. We have had two light frosts already, but neither of them made to the raised beds or the retaining wall. I will have to pull off the produce by next Saturday or Sunday depending on temps and frost. So I hope they grow like heck this week. I also have a ton of clean-up and fall bed creating to do, some plant moving to plan and accomplish and a yard to get ready for the hood Halloween Decorating contest. And I must have more mums and spring bulbs. Now sure how I’m going to pull all of that off in the 50 hour work weeks I have going on right now. But I’m betting you won’t be hearing from me as much. But for now The Husband and the Destroyer are at the game and MiniMe is off exploring on her bike. I am going to start the laundry and pick a project from the very long list of things I need and want to do. Meanwhile enjoy these pics of the garden in Indian Summer.

PS. Wasn’t the moon just awesome last night. I was out enjoying in until around 4:30. I good time was had by all.

Wanted: Bees to come frolic on my blossoms.

Posted: 2011/08/08 | Author: Lola | Filed under: Gardening | Tags: Bee, Garden, Gardening, Plant sexuality, Pumpkin, raised bed gardening, Square Foot Gardening, trellis gardening, Vine, Zinnia | 1 Comment

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I have been hesitant to show you my veggies, mostly because they are a pretty sorry lot of plants.

This is my fourth summer trying to grow vegetables. I have always had a garden in my life, even when I lived in apartments I tried to have a patio with some dirt on it somewhere so I could grow flowers. Once we built this house I quickly decided I would have an actual garden patch for veggies and try my luck. How hard can it be right? My parents did it for years and years. I have numerous friends who are on their 2nd+ years of doing Square Foot Gardening and I got the book for Christmas last year from one of my MIL ( I have two) . After the three previous summers of mediocre to nothing yields I was determined that THIS gardening season would be different. I would plan ahead like I always do, but THIS year I would plan better, I would plan smarter, I would vow to get my seed started in time, to nurture them lovingly ( keep the cats and kids from killing them) until it was planting time, to get them in the ground not too early and not too late. This year I would make the garden pretty and functional.

In spite of all of that, this year the veggies have still been a comedy of “errors”.

I painstakingly planned and organized, on index cards all of my seeds and space. I planned for 7 kinds of peppers, 3 kinds of tomatoes, 2 kinds of peas, 1 kind of beets, 2 kinds of spinach and one lettuce. 3 kinds of pumpkins and 1 kind of watermelon.

Some of these are cold crops, which I did not get in this year, oops. I blame the weather and the mini marathon training.

I started two+ trays of seeds, I got most of them to grow. and then I got confused about which plant is what hen it was time to place them in the garden. Veggie wise I’m not good at marking each little seed and then keeping the chaos out of planting time. So what I ended up with is a garden with some tomatoes, peppers and pumpkins in it.

I had no idea which tomato plants were what until they finally set fruit. all but one is fruiting, and almost all of them have some kind of curled leaf funk going on. It’s hard to know how much to water in a heat wave drought. I tend to over water, but I haven’t killed them yet and some of my fruit is even ripening. Which helped solve the mystery of the which plants are which. They appear to be as good as they are going to get.

I still have only a small idea of which pepper plants are what. I keep getting blossoms but not a single pepper fruit. I am so bummed because I have plans for all those exotic peppers. we cook a lot of recipes with peppers, I greedily wanted to use them to make my green tomatillo adobo sauce, and to roast and freeze for other uses.

The pumpkins are doing a great job of growing up the vertical trellis we made for them. I only had one pumpkin actually growing and I was getting a LOT of blossoms. They just seemed to bloom, then die and fall off in a really ugly pumpkin herpes like fashion. Plus the ants in that bed have decided to just make my pumpkin vines their own playground. They are either laying eggs on the plants or stealing and eating the eggs other bugs are laying on the blossoms and vines. This was really perplexing me. I haven’t grown pumpkins before. and I know tomatoes can get blossom rot. If there is a plant disease or plague in existence I’ve gotten it on my vegetables at some point or another during my numerous attempts to finally be a veggie grower.

Undaunted by my looming failure I turned to the internet. Only to discover that pumpkins have girl blossoms and boy blossoms. And if a bee or other such creature does not take boy pollen and put in on the girl stamen then I’m not getting nay pumpkin babies. You can go out very early in the morning and hand pollinate your blossoms, assuming you have boys open when girls are open and in need of pollinating. I am NOT into this. I closed my womb with an ablation almost 2 yeas ago, I’m not taking on pumpkin sexing as a hobby…so far. The girl blossoms have a teeny tiny pumpkin looking nodule on the stem below where the bloom will form. The boys are just straight stems. So I have 2.5 vines chock FULL of boy blooms, with very few girl blooms to be found. I lost a full half a vine with 2 babies in waiting on it to either a. some kind of nasty vine rot or b. the trimmer got too close and hacked off part of the base and killed the “best” part of the vine. So my 4 pumpkin hopeful harvest has been knocked back to just 2 that are growing.

Yes, I’m telling you my pumpkins aren’t getting enough plant sex=bee pollination. Turns out that maybe our issue in the pepper front as well. Sigh… Really? I have Russian Sage, Oregano, Zinnias, Sunflowers. I have not one but TWO bird feeders. My flower garden is a veritable bee , bird and hummingbird pleasure palace. NONE of them can get their parts over there and root around on some pepper and pumpkin blossoms? These are some good looking plants? They have nice open blossoms, the blossoms seem to last awhile. How besides planting things that bees like does one combat a lack of bee issue? Maybe I should take out a personal add for my poor pumpkins.